Before the fans have a chance to give their two cents about his take on Peter Parker in the franchise reboot "Amazing Spider-Man," Andrew Garfield got a confidence boost from the only other guy who knows what it means to wear the webs.

“I love Tobey Maguire's interpretation of the character – It's one of the things that rekindled for me and reminded me how much this character means to me,” Garfield says. “And when I watched that first film I lost my mind. I watched twice in a row when I first saw it. I had the wonderful fortune of meeting him after we finished shooting. I didn't seek him out, but he sent a very, very, very nice email once it was announced, basically giving me his blessing. It meant the world to me because I respect him so much as an actor, generally, and especially with the role that I'm now assuming.”

But before that, Sony Pictures seemed intent on making Garfield sweat out the audition process.

“I was in Cancun at the Sony press junket for 'Social Network' and I was waiting to hear about whether or not I'd be able to fulfill a childhood dream – which wasn't annoying at all, to be waiting for that knowledge,” he laughs. “I was surrounded by people who knew. probably, and I was reading every single eyebrow twitch or lip curl that would give away whether or not I got the role.”

“Everyone was being incredibly poker-faced,” he continues, “and at the end of a press day talking about 'The Social Network', [the former Sony Pictures president] Amy Pascal's assistant came and got me from the room that I was in and he said, stone-faced, 'Amy wants to have a quick word with you up in her suite.' I said, 'Oh, okay. Fine. She's going to let me down easy and that's really sweet of her.' So, I went up and I walked into her room, but the person that answered the door was [director] Marc Webb. And at that point I was like, 'Well, this is going to be the most defining experience of my life – a turning point.'

“There was champagne and there was sweetness and there was lots of love in that room,” remembers Garfield. “I'll never forget it, and they really gave me a special thing to tell my grandkids. Then we went down the back of the hotel we were at, through the kitchen. I was very confused because I was being treated like Elvis, but I looked like a skinny, little spider monkey.”